Wayback Thursday’s – Memorial Day Weekend 2008 “The Summer Of Love.”

This week we take our Wayback Machine to Memorial Day 2008 our Summer Of Love. It was a time when we were all just discovering our fascination with social media and figuring out ways to incorporate it into our art. There was a merging of different mediums under this one umbrella that we now embrace as Social Media. But we didn’t just engage online, we were meeting every day on the streets, boutiques and lofts of downtown Manhattan and North Brooklyn and it was all organic. I think that it was organic is what made it special. Up until then there was a separation between what happened online and what happened in the real world. Unless it was a scheduled “meet up” people tended to separate their off-line experience from their virtual ones. Leading up to the Summer of 2008 that line was blurring until it vanished completely.

Looking back now I see that the years following 2008 people (myself included) started to figure out ways to commoditize new media. Corporations started paying us to do our art, our friends wanted their own shows, we started leaving our day jobs and the stakes got higher. It wasn’t just about creating anymore. For me the camera phone and later the DSLR video camera was about to take the novelty out of what was a special little video project I called The New Pop. Don’t misunderstand me, I am glad it happened in fact I predicted that once everyone started shooting video it would legitimize the art form and make it easier for me to make a living as a videographer. Still, I can’t help but reminisce about the days when people weren’t so use to having a video camera in their face, on a whole folks today are more jaded and self conscious about being documented.

In this video Texas and I decided to have a non-stop Memorial day weekend that took us from the now defunct outdoor venues The Yard and Hope Lounge in Brooklyn, to a naked Hot Tub party and a Rooftop gathering in Manhattan. Through it all I had one question for my friends “What Are You Doing This Summer?”

Enjoy
TrVZ

Wayback Trivia: During that incredible Memorial day weekend while Texas & I were documenting parties non-stop, the visibly absent Tone (our third partner) was out of town attending a wedding. Of course as soon as he returned we rubbed it in with repeated stories of what went down and just how much he missed out. When we got to the story of our naked hot tub adventure Tone visibly shook by the fact that he missed out would refer to the Hot Tub as having green water. Lol. It wasn’t green but whatever works for you Tone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2011 at 4:58 am and is filed under VIDEO, WAYBACK THURSDAY.
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